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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!mgnetp!ihnp4!mhuxl!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.consumers
Subject: Re: Need a *smart* alarm clock
Message-ID: <62@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 26-Jun-84 17:32:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.62
Posted: Tue Jun 26 17:32:53 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Jun-84 03:48:23 EDT
References: <1029@ihuxq.UUCP> <697@u1100a.UUCP>
Reply-To: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus
Lines: 22

I looked at the Seiko watch.  It costs $200 here in Columbus
at JC Penneys, persumably discounts are available.

Basically it's a watch with a 4 line x 10 character (5x7 dot)
display - huge for a watch.  It has a reasonable alarm and
very nice stopwatch, plus two scratch pads.  You have to use
the keyboard to enter things into the scratch pads, each pad
holds about 1K of text (100 lines of 10 chars each).

What it could NOT do (and why I didn't buy it) was keep my calendar.
It cannot, for example, remember more than one time to wake up,
nor can it do anything more intelligent than beep when it does.
(The font has characters for phone calls, meetings, dinners, and
airplanes, but they are just regular characters.)  Such a waste.

Also, in the store, the display was almost impossible to read.
All the dots were dark, not just the ones that were "on".  As
a result, I had to twist it under the light until I could barely
make out the display.  Perhaps the battery was low, but this was
a serious botch, and the clerk had no idea why.

	Mark